


Snake Girl

by Jennistar



Category: Atlantis (UK TV)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Gen, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-10-28
Packaged: 2017-12-30 19:25:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jennistar/pseuds/Jennistar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Medusa had always liked snakes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snake Girl

Medusa had always liked snakes.

Girls didn’t often like reptiles, of course, but she’d never been a typical girl. As a child, she would rather chase lizards along hot brick walls than sit in shady pavilions with her parents, and as a young woman she often came home covered in dust and mud from time spent fishing for frogs in her hometown’s sulky little river. Her mother had first tried to instil some womanly decorum in her, then gave it up as a lost cause and accepted the dusty, grimy, happy Medusa with the minimum of fuss. She had been a stately woman, her mother, ladylike in all meanings of the word, and it was only on the day she died that Medusa had looked in the mirror and realised that yes, it was true what people said, she actually did look a lot like her.

She tried, after that, to adopt some of her mother’s mannerisms. Only some, not all. No one woman could be always ladylike or always a ruffian. Everyone was a mix of both. Everyone had their dirty, dusty moments and their regal, noble moments. Medusa just decided it was time to drag some of those noble aspects to the fore.

For that, she needed to leave her hometown. She loved it, but it was filled with people who still called her ‘Snake Girl’ after that incident in her schoolroom with a pet that got out of control, and that had been over fifteen years ago. So she left for the big city of Atlantis.

She didn’t start out very well, getting captured by the Maenads almost straightaway and spending a lot of time digging in dust and not looking her best. But that was how she met Jason and his friends, and all in all she wouldn’t change that meeting for the world.

They treated her like a woman. Mostly because she seemed to be the only one they really knew, and they all tackled this in different ways.

Whereas he just seemed to assume that Hercules and Pythagoras would help him as a matter of course, Jason would plead for her assistance in whatever scrape he had got himself into this week, all puppy-dog eyes and down-turned mouth, and he always presented her with a nice if rather hastily gathered together bunch of flowers after the danger was done and gone, simply as a thank you.

Pythagoras would often turn up at her door and beg her to let him take her to a place classier than the tavern so that he had the excuse to eat something nice for once and in pleasant, quieter surroundings. And they would always stay in the restaurant until closing time, chatting about all sorts of things. Medusa properly listened to Pythagoras, which she was starting to believe was a rarity for him.

And then there was Hercules. Well. Hercules didn’t treat her like a woman. Most of the time he appeared to think she was a goddess who had accidentally stepped into his life and was likely to vanish as soon as she realised her mistake. He treated her like she was a beautiful sprite who could skip away at any moment and leave him bereft. He was careful with her like he wasn’t careful with anyone else. Oh, he had his moments where he slipped and said or did stupid things, but he tried. He tried so hard that it was, at first, a bit terrifying. To be so worshipped, so quickly, and with no real reason for it. Hercules didn’t know about Snake Girl, or evenings spent chasing lizards along walls. He probably wouldn’t even believe it if he heard it.

So for the first few months, Medusa tried everything she could to run from it. Then she resented the idea that she had to run from it, that she thought herself unworthy of adoration, and tried instead to accept it and float, untouchable, on the top of it - like a lady with decorum would.

And so she settled, a little rockily, into her life in Atlantis. She made other friendships, all of them different from those intimate, often too-close friendships back in her hometown, but those three men remained her favourites. She enjoyed Jason’s often bizarre requests and little notes of thanks, Pythagoras’s desperate eyes when he explained that if he saw another tankard of ale again it would be too soon. And she found herself starting to like Hercules’s attempts at, for want of a better word, _wooing_ her, which were as charming as they were clumsy. He would turn up covered in riverweed, cupping in his hands a water lily that he had seen from the opposite bank and thought was perfect for her. A man in a tavern would mutter something about her to his friend and the next thing she knew, Hercules would be throwing punches and they would all end up covered in beer and watching Pythagoras alternately sew up Hercules’s wounds and yell at him for being an idiot.

Hercules knew he wasn’t a hero but for her he tried to be one. No one, not even her stately mother, had told Medusa what to do in this scenario. Maybe no one had ever experienced it before.

* * *

One day, a stall arrived in the market that sold unusual pets from all over the world. Jason, for some reason, had a mental breakdown when he saw a chimera, and Pythagoras got distracted by the cuteness of tiny dwarf rabbits from some land afar, so it was only her and Hercules by the time they got to the reptile section of the stall.

For a while she was so busy cooing over a selection of tiny jewel-like frogs in a pot that she didn’t notice Hercules wasn’t saying anything, and it was only when she persuaded the stall-keeper to let her hold a emerald green snake that she realised he was staring at her.

“What?” she said, a bit shortly.

“You like snakes,” he replied, a bit dumbly. The snake was wound around her wrist and was making its way up her arm, red tongue flickering.

“Well, yes,” she said, then remembered that ladies wouldn’t. They wouldn’t just take hold of such a creature and let it wander freely up and down their bodies. They would stick with the cute and fluffy creatures, not the ones that didn’t blink and barely seemed to breathe. It was the first time she had shown that old Medusa in Atlantis, the Snake Girl. She hesitated, suddenly wary.

Instead of seeming puzzled though, Hercules merely ran a careful finger along the snake’s green back.

“I know it’s not usual,” Medusa said, unnerved by his lack of response and wanting to get the worst over with. “Ladies do not like snakes.”

“But goddesses can like anything they want,” he said, and smiled at her.

Medusa threw herself into it. “I don’t like fabrics or perfumes or delicate fineries,” she said. “I like stone. I like the cold and the barren earth and animals that have scales.”

“And,” Hercules said, utterly unperturbed. “You would not be you if you did not. But you are you. Absolutely, undeniably you. For which I am eternally grateful.”

The snake reached her shoulder and curled itself around it. Medusa turned to remove it from her and give it back to the stall-keeper, and took the opportunity to blink her tears away while she was at it.

By the time she’d turned around again, she was once more composed.

* * *

 

Hercules said nothing more to her about it, and she wondered if she’d put him off a bit, despite what he’d said. She was surprised to find the thought disheartened her more than she realised it would.

And then, one day, she returned from her work in the palace to find a little gift waiting on her table. It was a small cage, and inside it, the emerald green snake sat, watching her with its beady eyes.

There was no note, but there didn’t need to be.

* * *

 

In the darkness of those later days, when she was no longer gifted but cursed with reptiles and stone, she remembered that moment when she had laid eyes on the animal and knew instantly who it was from.

Sometimes the memory lifted the darkness in her heart.

A lot of the time it didn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> It's very late at night and I'm tired and I love Medusa and am so sad she will have a sad ending so I wrote a fic, hope you like...


End file.
